I am still seeing VERY wild fluctuations in my WMT data. Despite a 70% traffic recovery, I am still seeing pages drop 300 to 400 positions, then rise. In the past 72 hours, another page just fell about 400. Clearly there is significant instability right now. There is no guarantee that my ranking improvement will stick, although the trend continues upward. This continuous cycle of pages drop 400 then rise 400 is ridiculous.

I'm seeing big brands moving into the top spots on some niches where they hadn't ranked before... but the results don't yet seem stable. I'd always (ie, for the last 8 or 9 years) felt that some niches were vulnerable to major brand competition if the major brands intelligently targeted them. In some cases, that now appears to be happening.

The targeting, though, is more than just SEO... the brands are actually paying attention to those niche areas. Sort of like specialized food shops being replaced by expanded deli counters in some savvy supermarkets, or chains created to cover those niches.

Robert, even if Amazon post junk pages for a medium size niche their "trust" could most likely overdo any of 'us,' that's one major Panda flaw. I see it with AOL, Yahoo and other portals now. Google likes them even though we've been in that niche for 10 years before and content is more or less the same and what the users expect /what it is in the title. (People need to remember that no every site has articles ;))

Backlinks have also lost their value? If back brands are now ranking higher than sites with much more unique content and strong backlinks, Google is now doing BIG BIG partiality. I just wish Google Shares keep going down and down so they know they have done something wrong! So angry!

For a couple of key phrases I observe, I've noticed that Google currently makes mistakes in displaying relevant results.

For example, if you search for small widgets, on the 1st SERP page you have 5 results (including #1) that are about widgets for small business (these results are from major brands in the widget industry). Another one result is about a widget with small dots. All of these pages don't have "small widgets" mentioned anywhere. Only remaining 4 results actually are about small widgets.

From a point of view of a small widget seeker, more than 60% of the 1st page results are useless (on Bing it's 20% for the same phrase).

Similarly, another search for blue widget Xs model displays results containing blue widget's X, although on the Net there are a lot of quality pages about blue widget Xs.

I'm just so much frustrated with all this that I can't describe. I usually don't visit forums much but this is the first time I've seen a SITEWIDE ranking drop in the last 5 years of working online.

I've concluded that Google is testing some "specific niches" at the moment. I'm monitoring some other terms as well and there is LITERALLY no serp movment. The front page is showing a fix set of results since last 10 days.

I'm asking this to seasoned guys

Is it possible that Google is doing something only to CERTAIN queries or CERTAIN sites? It all seem very weird and my site just bouncing back and fourth from page 5 to page 7. It just sounds like there is some big hurdle on page 5 and site can't rise beyond that page.

@learnseo81 want the truth? Google sees small web people now as free loaders, they see the clicks as 'theirs' and hate to give them to people making 'easy money.' Their former CEO called it a cesspool when he met with the print media in 2008 and said that brands will clean it up. Meaning, eventually no clicks for you or me, just big brands.

As long as the top sites keep their rankings so Google is not embarrassed they can experiment drastically and take away 70% of the traffic in a heartbeat and even call your site bad.

So, serps now make no normal sense, it's a whole new world and Google is being more honest lately.

But when there's a major update, serps do fluctuate a lot more. And yes Goog can penalize one keyword and not touch the rest, I know it for a fact.

To those who are pandalized by the latest update. What is your bounce rate as determined in Google analytics? One of my sites which get pandalized has a bounce rate of 76%! I'm starting to suspect that bounce rate is a very important metric in post panda world. What's your thought ?

My bounce rate is 14.25%. However, my tracking script has been modified with a line that counts only page views under 10 seconds as bounces. Without that script modification, the bounce rate is about 40%.

I was wondering what would happen to bounce rate when I removed adsense. I haven't gotten rid of 100% of the ads yet but about 80%. As of the last analytics update the bounce rate went from 73% down to 66% (all time low).

No treally, you're describing a high "click-back" rate. Bounce rate measures a lot more than clicks back to the SERP.

What can mean bounce rate?

- User opens a page of a website and then instantly closes the browser - User clicks back (in this case 90% comes back to google) - User follows a link to a new website (from the current page)

I think out of this 3 factors an high bounce rate website on top of serps is going to sends lot of more traffic to google. (But still I repeat: I don't think google will ever think to reward high bounce website)

Here is my problem, When I looked at my bounce rates for a few several pages of my pandalized site, my top level domain has a bounce rate of 76%, my category pages have an average bounce rate of 45%. When I searched for one of my main keywords for top level domain, one of my category page showed up on page 5 but my top level domain was nowhere to be found. This issue occurs in pandalized google domains ( .com, co.uk, .aus, my ). Strange huh ?

Panda has introduced some fundamental flaws that continue on within search. If I search for information, one moment I could get totally irrelevant results, and have to go to another search engine to find what I need and then hours later, the results for the same search are actually looking better. Is this part of the everflux that is happening? And maybe one reason why some are not finding fault with certain searches whereas others are reporting results that would make even a fledgling search engine look beyond amateurish? The problem that I saw and continue to see with the introduction of Panda is that search results for a particular term may vary widely from one moment to the next. In the new post Panda world the relevancy factor just gets blown so often now with Google's search results. But what I can't figure out is how their algorithm was released with such a high failure rate that even a 6th grader could pick up that there are some major ongoing problems. After 3 months it's hard to imagine that things are not looking much better in search. And yes, a 6th grader I know today couldn't find anything near what they were looking for when searching for info related to a popular sports event. Hours later, I do find appropriate results, but during the day today, nothing close to the proper information was being displayed. This is not an isolated incident, but unless one keeps a printout of the terms, time and date of the search, it is hard to track. Wondering if it could be useful to keep a log of these type of searches. This is not about whether Google is blocking non quality and promoting quality sites. Or whether big brands deserve to be on top or not. Or what the corporate PR "spin" machine says about Panda. This is just looking at the quality or lack thereof of the relevancy of information returned and then noting how what one gets can fluctuate from useful to not even close to the mark. If all the webmasters are taken out of the equation and we are not debating whether certain sites should or should not have triggered the Panda, what we end up with is that search to succeed long term needs to deliver at least a bare minimum of relevant results. That is where I am seeing Google miss the mark with Panda. If it's not ready for Prime Time, then go back and fix it until it is ready for release. In construction we have a saying that if the foundation and bones of a home are poor and in so much disrepair sometimes it is best to start over with a clean slate. Maybe that's what needs to happen with Panda. I'm just writing in frustration after spending a day where I wasn't working on websites, or doing any kind of promotion. Today all I wanted was relevant information and during the afternoon, that was not what I got using Google.